With Twitter in disarray since the world's richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralised, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users.
"The bird is free," tweeted Tesla mogul Elon Musk when he completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. But many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world's "town square" being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.
What is it?
For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures.
But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority — a company — Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation.
People swap posts and links with others on their own server — or Mastodon "instance" — and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers across the growing network.
Why Mastodon?
Developed by German programme Eugen Rochko, Mastodon was born of his desire to create a public sphere that was beyond the control of a single entity.
Mastodon's advocates say its decentralised approach makes it fundamentally different: rather than go to Twitter's centrally-provided service, every user can choose their own provider, or even run their own Mastodon instance, much as users can e-mail from Gmail or an employer-provided account or run their own e-mail server.
No single company or person, can impose their will on the whole system or shut it all down, the platform's advocates say.
How popular is it?
Last week, Mr Rochko said that the network hit over 1 million monthly active users.
That is still tiny compared with his established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had seen an advert as of the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users as of the third quarter.
However, it's growing rapidly.
Before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, Mastodon's growth averaged 60-80 new users an hour, according to the widely-cited Mastodon Users account. It showed 3,568 new registrations in one hour on Monday morning.
Where do I start?
There's an Irish-specific Mastodon server or instance, which can be found at mastodon.ie.
Lots of Irish Twitter users have opted to join the server, which currently hosts 14,000 users.
There's also an iOS and Android app available for download.
Are there drawbacks?
The federated approach has downsides: It is harder to find people to follow on Mastodon then on the neatly ordered town square that centrally administered Twitter or Facebook can offer — Reuters
